So I decided the other day that I wanted to set my desktop background image to one that spanned across both monitors, instead of being duplicated on each monitor. I've done this many times before with Windows XP. No big deal. Well, several hours and a few swear words later I finally got it working on my Vista computer. Thought I'd share my frustration in the hopes of helping someone else.
So I did the normal stuff you would do. I looked at my monitor resolution and took the height as is, and multiplied the width by 2 (cause I have two monitors and I want the picture to span them both). I used Photoshop Elements to create a picture I wanted using these dimensions. Then I used Explorer to locate my new picture file, right clicked on the picture and said, set as desktop picture. The new picture was placed on my desktop, but no matter how I tried it would not span across the two monitors correctly.
I struggled with this for hours it seems, but I was finally able to get it to work. The problem seems to be when you right-click a file and select set as desktop picture, some kind of conversion or optimization takes place, and the picture is no longer the right size. Instead, if I right click on the desktop, select Personalize, the Desktop Background, I end up at the Desktop Background dialog box. From there I have to use the Browse button to locate the properly sized image. Once the image has been selected I set the position to be tiled and bingo, the picture is properly displayed. Phew. What a struggle.
Bottom line, browse to the picture instead of right clicking on the picture to get this to work. Good luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment